Opt-Out at School: Supporting a Low-Tech Educational Experience
[An excerpt from The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can’t]
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be ignited.” -Plutarch (45–120 CE)
“Ms. Terrell? My iPad is on too bright.” -Charlie, age 6
This afternoon, I am taking a walk through the woods surrounding our neighborhood school. It is a small school, less than 500 children, and, nearly a decade ago, was often touted for its excellent test scores, warm and approachable teachers, and outstanding parental involvement. On the outside, it looks very much like the public school I remember attending as a child. There’s a clanging flagpole, rusted basketball hoops on the playground, a single-file army of yellow school buses awaiting the closing bell.
But as I pass along the sidewalk and glance inside the windows, I see a marked difference in the classrooms we all once knew. There are no clay pots lining the windowsill with eggshell seedlings. There are no tulip finger paints taped along the doorframes. In fact, I pause to register any signs of spring before I’m distracted by an oversized TV display in the center of the room. In bright, flashing lights, the TV is displaying a countdown of sorts. 4:38, 4:37, 4:36… the children’s heads are all hunched over their individual screens, oblivious to the marching orders of the clock. I watch as the time flashes onward, looking for clues as to what happens when it hits zero.
Later, a friend would tell me this was her child’s recess. The day had been “too cold to go outside,” so the kids were granted extra iPad time.
"Just educational apps, though,” she assures me.
IRREPARABLE HARM
Many parents were first introduced to these educational apps during Covid’s remote learning experiment. Learning apps like Homer, Kahoot!, or Prodigy math were assigned as homework to upwards of 90,000 schools throughout the nation. But according to childhood advocacy group Fairplay, there is irreparable harm baked into these apps. From promoting excessive screen time to deceiving parents and educators, many of these apps teach our children to be consumers, not learners.
“Prodigy may keep children quiet and happy while teachers or parents are busy, but it doesn’t teach them math,” says Faith Boninger, a commercialism in education researcher at the National Education Policy Center for University of Colorado Boulder. “Research indicates that kids must spend hours in the game to improve their math achievement scores by just one point. That might not be so terrible, perhaps, but during those hours they endure emotionally abusive marketing until they convince their parents to shell out money for a membership. Under a pretense of teaching math, Prodigy is using schools to access and manipulate a lucrative child market.”
Kathryn Starke, founder and national literacy consultant at Creative Minds Publications agrees that personalized learning is failing our kids - in more ways than one. “I have seen the impact of tech in classrooms, especially in the primary grades. This higher iPad use is negatively affecting student behavior in stamina of reading traditional text and writing. Problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, collaboration, creativity, and attention spans of young children have also seen a decline since this increase of technology in the K-2 classroom,” she tells me. “Unless students share the details of their educational day at home, I'm not sure all parents are aware of the amount of time their children are experiencing screen time in elementary schools on a daily basis.”
For many parents, these assigned learning apps were the gateway into a digital future they didn’t envision for their kids. “I was all for personalized learning when my kids’ teachers started talking about it,” writes one parent. “But I didn’t realize how much screen time it would mean, and how much homework would be assigned on a device. I can already tell [my 5th grader] is becoming addicted to the rewards of these learning apps. It’s really created a wedge between us. I feel like I’m standing between his success at school whenever I place limits on the device.”
If parents are having a difficult time placing boundaries on their child’s app usage, it’s no wonder teachers are feeling just as powerless. “The administration really pushes for better test scores, which often means more content input,” noted an elementary teacher I spoke with. “But I’m seeing the negative effects on our kids every day - there are growing outbursts, skyrocketing distractions. I want to just pitch the iPads in the garbage and start over, go back to the way learning used to be; the reasons I went into teaching in the first place.”
Kathryn Starke agrees. “I have been in education for almost twenty years… an iPad-centered classroom experience is certainly not what I envisioned when I set out to work in education,” she says. “School districts around the country often have a budget that is allocated strictly to EdTech, which means schools have to implement various apps and platforms, whether the options on the market are beneficial or not.”
If anyone might see the value in higher tech budgets, it would certainly be those in the tech industry, right? The founders, the programmers, the futurists? Not exactly. It’s a common fact that many of tech’s most prominent leaders advocated for less technology in the education of their own children.
Wired founder and father of three Kevin Kelly has a theory why. “I’m not sure we want the environment of school to reflect only the current media landscape,” he writes. “If you have an education that mirrors society too much, it won’t be effective in improving it. There is value in quiet contemplation, going deep as you might do into a book, being involved in nature… as we remodel education, the target is not to produce better workers but wider thinkers.”
And yet, many classrooms simply aren’t equipped to adequately address a wider thinking learning experience - and our national test scores, coupled with our growing rates of childhood anxiety and depression, reflect that. The barriers are many: administration, access to nature, classroom sizes, budgets, and - of course - technology. Says one 7-year-old I spoke with, “My teacher doesn’t like us to play in the mud at recess because it makes the iPads dirty.”
Many educators admit that their hands are tied. “We’ve got to guard those iPads with our lives,” one grimaced. “You know, because of the 1:1 program.”
I didn’t know, not exactly, so I contacted someone who would.
EVERY STUDENT’S BACKPACK
I arranged an interview with Darrell Lynn, a name you might not be familiar with, but a name Apple’s founder Steve Jobs certainly was.
In 2002, Lynn, a director at Apple, worked alongside Steve Jobs to establish Apple's Lighthouse Project, which aimed to put iBooks into every student's backpack. According to Lynn’s PR representative, as a result of his efforts, Apple's share in the education market grew from 11% to 40%. He later created and led the company's 1:1 program, shifting the deployment of computers in education to a more consumer-facing model, increasing the company's education market share to a dominating 63%.
In short: if I was looking for the guy who put an iPad in your child’s backpack, I’d found him. I communicated back and forth with his PR specialist, who was happy to help round out my research on this chapter. Until I touched on one subject in particular.
My question to Lynn was simple:, “Knowing Steve Jobs didn't allow his kids to have iPads, how did [Lynn’s] team navigate the ethics of this initiative?”
Months later, I’m still awaiting a response.
AN IPERSON
More cords, more plugs, more algorithms, more webs, more input. Silicon Valley calls this personalized learning. In the world of K-12 educational technology, personalized learning is often defined as the utilization of digital devices “to tailor instruction to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, interests and preferences, and optimal pace of learning.”
Lovely in theory, right? But it doesn’t quite add up. If we’re tailoring our educational standards to reflect each child’s pace, why are we still testing for nationwide averages? If we believe in the idea of strengths and weaknesses, why are we still relying on pass/fail grades? If we’re accounting for every child’s interest and preference, what’s to be said of those who prefer a low-tech educational experience? Where’s the app for that?
In fact, personalized learning is little more than a veiled strategy to farm out our child’s education (and data) to BigTech. It goes like this: the iPad becomes the teacher. The teacher becomes the iPad manager. And the children? They become an iPerson: the product of Silicon Valley’s largest educational experiment yet.
I was curious what personalized learning looks like in today’s classrooms, so I asked veteran teachers and Screen Schooled authors Matt Miles and Joe Clement. “20+ kids in a room, all on their laptops or tablets, headphones on, working silently on their own device with almost no interaction with each other or their teacher. How is that personalized?” Matt tells me, offering a specific example that hit a bit too close to home.
His son was struggling with his assigned math homework. Over and over, Matt heard the iPad buzz - Wrong, try again. Wrong, try again. Wrong, try again. “He was in tears,” Matt says. After he went to offer help on the problem “What two numbers make 6?,” he watched his son try 3+3. Wrong, try again.
“Even as an adult with moderate math skills, I had to think about it,” Matt tells me. “3 and 3 do make 6… What the hell is wrong with this thing? I finally thought to have him try 4 and 2 and boom, that was what this program was looking for. Now...was that personalized learning? Would [his teacher] simply say Wrong, try again... and keep repeating that until he was in tears? Can you imagine a teacher that bad? But these programs are being sold as ‘personalized learning devices.’ It's the biggest marketing scam I can imagine. What a misnomer.”
“Matt's son's experience is all too common,” his co-author chimes in.“And [that’s why] the word personalized learning might be the most dangerous one that EdTech proponents use,” he says. “The phrase is brilliant marketing, to be certain. However, what [personalized learning] is, most often, is a kid getting online and answering questions. True "personalized learning" means I know my students, in a genuine, human way. I know when they need to be pushed. I can see confusion on their faces. I know when they are bored and ready to move on. Relationships matter. Human people matter. When a caring adult reaches out and says, in word or deed, "I've got you," that carries more weight for a child than any algorithm… That deepened human relationship will do far more for that child in the short and long term than a happy face emoji and on-screen confetti explosion will when they get a question correct.”
The students hate it. The parents hate it. The teachers hate it. So what gives? “Using the algorithms to teach (and collect data) is simply quicker and cheaper for school districts,” Joe tells me. “They view it as more efficient.”
But it’s not. Joe tells me about his third grade daughter who is required to take periodic math assessments online. His daughter doesn’t use a phone or computer at home, so she routinely clicks or types the wrong thing on questions she knows, and it’s marked as incorrect. “Now she’s in her head about it,” Joe says. “So not only is this "personalized" program bad for kids, it's giving the district bad information. If they simply asked my daughter's excellent teacher for an assessment of all of the kids in her classroom, they would get the real story.”
But, when it comes to EdTech, the story that matters is the one that pays.
In 2016, Zuckerberg announced his plan to donate 99 percent of his Facebook shares—worth an estimated $45 billion—to [personalized learning]. “We don’t know for certain that it’s going to work,” he said. “All we can really hope to do is provide an initial boost and try to show that it could work as a model, and hopefully it gets its own tailwind that carries it towards mainstream adoption.”
I DON’T USE CELL PHONES
So if BigTech’s formula of personalized learning isn’t working, what might? And how can we - as parents, as families - combat the effects?
Years later, I would connect with a kindred spirit in my quest for a low-tech and high-impact educational experience. I first met award-winning author, neurophysiologist and educator Dr. Carla Hannaford on a busy sidewalk in downtown Dallas where she had just come from a mile-long jaunt down Commerce Street. “I’d have told you I was running late,” she laughed. “But I don’t use cell phones.”
Carla is a vibrant soul with sparkling eyes who believes deeply in - and has dedicated her life’s work - to the brain and body connection. “We take in our world through our senses, through our body, through movement. And so we are really suddenly realizing that the top neuroscientists in the world are saying the only way that we actually learn is through hands-on sensory input. [Our hands] are the last organ in the body to fully develop. They’re our greatest tool, and it's so vital that we do hands-on things. Swiping up on our device doesn't work. It doesn't do it. We need to be out in nature, moving.”
I asked what that meant for parents of students who are learning on iPads throughout the day. How can those families support their kids once they’re home? How can they destimulate that sort of digital input? “Any movement that integrates both hemispheres; especially the frontal lobes where executive reasoning takes place and where the high level emotions reside - love, altruism, empathy, compassion, etc,” she says to me. “Integrated, cross lateral movements do this beautifully - taking a walk, doing any of mythe Brain Gym movements, yoga, Tai Chi, etc. Even just physically playing with each other - like a soccer game.”
Her methods don’t just work for kids. “I really depend on Hook-Ups, Thinking Caps, and Lazy 8's to keep me present myself,” Carla admits.
HOW SCHOOL ONCE WAS
Carla’s groundbreaking work in whole body education is leading the charge for new educational movements all over the country; hybrid schools, homeschooling co-ops, forest schools, outdoor education camps, and deschooling programs are growing in popularity for families seeking to return to a more holistic - and more effective - approach to their child’s education.
Funnily enough, these programs all have one key thing in common: they’re modeled after how school once was - but no longer is. “When I began my teaching career in 1969, open classrooms were all the rage,” writes Dr. Jean Lomino, director and lead trainer of the Forest School Teacher Institute. “A few years later, walls went back up and open classrooms were a thing of the past. But I kept right on teaching the best way I knew—experientially, with as many field trips and nature-based lessons as possible.”
Dr. Lomino is a champion in personhood learning, starting the first certified forest Kindergarten in the state of Tennessee. She has taught countless students, trained teachers from all corners of the world, and has presented at the International Symposium of Forest Kindergartens in Seoul. But one of her greatest accomplishments was that of her last years in the classroom with 7th and 8th graders. “My co-teacher and I focused our efforts on developing an environmental education project. We began an in-depth study of the creek that ran through the community, doing water quality testing, clearing trash, and advocating for our creek’s health. The students eagerly got to work, establishing a legal 501c3 called Mission Environment, electing their own officers, and running it as a business. The end result was a greenway built by the city along the creek. This was [personhood] learning at its best—and the parents and teachers were thrilled to see children pursuing learning with joy and enthusiasm because it was real and they were serving their community and helping to preserve the environment.”
As I listen to her story, I’m met with a pang of regret for the children that will never get to experience this sort of ownership and contribution to the natural world around them. Just yesterday, I received an email from our local nature preserve, celebrating a new initiative to replace their community-wide, all-age forest hikes. “Now, introducing VIRTUAL HIKES!” the subject line read. “Join naturalist Amanda on Facebook Live as she hikes a trail, discusses seasonal ecology, and identifies species along the way. Participate in the live chat or just enjoy the scenery of the woods… from the comfort of your chair.”
A DIFFERENT MODEL
And yet, there is hope, and it can be found in the unlikeliest of sources: Mark Zuckerberg’s high school Alma Mater: Phillips Exeter Academy. A peek into the New Hampshire boarding school with a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:5 reveals a different model entirely; students are shown in collaborative images, books scattered on every surface, chalkboard scrawls exploring all manner of subjects. While EdTech pushes personalized learning, individual results, algorithmic paths, Exeter abandons every ounce of that approach by centering their students around a device that isn’t rectangle, but oval.
A table.
They call the pedagogy Harkness, established in 1930 by Edward Harkness, a “man who believed learning should be a democratic affair.” The concept? Twelve students for every one teacher, sitting around an oval table, discussing. “It’s about collaboration and respect, where every voice carries equal weight, even when you don’t agree,” the school’s website touts. “It’s where you explore ideas as a group, developing the courage to speak, the compassion to listen and the empathy to understand. It’s not about being right or wrong.
It’s a collaborative approach to problem solving and learning. We use it in every discipline and subject we teach at Exeter.”
It sounds refreshing. It sounds revolutionary. It sounds a lot like family dinner.
CREATING SPACE
While many families can’t control what happens inside the walls of their classrooms, we can - and must - offer a reprieve within the walls of our homes. One family I spoke with hosts “Debate Night” each evening with their four kids. Over dinner, each child takes turns choosing an issue that they’re curious about, offering what they know about the subject already. “It’s been a really great way to kind of rewire some thought patterns or societal untruths that have rubbed off on them,” the mother writes. “It’s through these conversations that my older kids can learn how to think critically, to prepare an argument, to listen thoroughly and well. And the younger kids get to see that all modeled. While I can’t ensure they’re getting that sort of communication practice at school, I can make sure they get it here.”
Family walks, shuffleboard tournaments, baking dessert. Creating space to have open conversations, distraction and interruption-free, is perhaps our greatest tool to wield against a growing EdTech movement that sees our children not as people, but as numbers and data and scores.
After all, to be more engaging than the algorithm, we have to actually engage.
One teen I spoke with wished her parents would make tech use a dinnertime topic. “They ask me about school, but school feels like it’s all tech anyway, so it would be nice to have an open door to talk about that instead,” she says. “And I’d love to hear from my parents about their tech pitfalls, too! I think that would build more of a bridge so it’s like we’re actually in this together, and it would help me to understand that tech use impacts adults, too. Kind of… see what we’re in for later down the road.”
“I used to let my child decompress on his iPad after school because he was just so tired from the day,” one father writes. “But then I realized he wasn’t tired, he was overstimulated. And the overstimulation was just compounded. We shoot hoops outside now, and it’s like I’ve got my kid back.”
“I’ve had to fight harder to keep my evenings free,” says one mother I spoke with. “I recognize that I only get my child for a few hours every night, and even though I’m tired from my day, too, it’s just not worth it to use that valuable time shuffling him back and forth to activities. Detoxing him digitally and connecting as a family has become our new extracurricular. It’s harder than I thought, but I’m already seeing amazing results in the way we interact together.”
While the future of personalized, digitally-enhanced learning seems like an uphill battle, it’s worth the fight to advocate for a generation of opt out kids. “Educational policy makers are always interested in hearing what the parents/tax payers/voters in their district have to say,” Screen Schooled authors Matt Miles and Joe Clement encourage. “Reach out to school boards, superintendents and principals to let them know your stance on technology. Most schools (if not all) have some sort of opt-out policy for device usage. Some require device usage in school, but allow you to opt out of bringing one home. If enough parents start opting kids out, or at least asking questions and presenting information they have learned, policy makers will have no choice but to take notice.”
TIP: Nonprofit advocacy group Fairplay has created an impressive toolkit called, Screens in Schools Action Kit, empowering parents to speak out against EdTech’s harmful initiatives. Filled with templates for letters to administrators and local newspapers, handouts for PTA meetings, research handouts, petitions, opt-out forms, the kit is an exhaustive resource to aid parents in the fight against EdTEch. Download a toolkit here.
PAINT, CARDBOARD, SAND
District teacher of the year Kevin Stinehart has seen firsthand the benefits of movement and exploration extending far beyond a child’s behavior. “When our students' recess time was doubled and offered multiple times a day, our behavior issues plummeted, math and reading scores rose substantially, kids were happier, healthier, and more primed for education,” he tells me. “With basic social and emotional needs met, kids do better in every arena. I would extend that to just humans in general - adults too need their social, emotional, and mental health needs met in order to achieve goals, reach their dreams, and have a meaningful life.”
The research stands: dirt, water, and all manner of natural elements are the very building blocks of a child’s education. Tactile skills, sensory play - it’s an essential introduction to the world we live in. “Even the best educational computer programs and games, devised with the help of the best educators, contain a tiny fraction of the outcomes of a single child equipped with a crayon and paper,” writes author David Sax in The Revenge of Analog. “A child’s limitless imagination can only do what the computer allows them to, and no more. The best toys, by contrast, are really 10 percent toy and 90 percent child: paint, cardboard, sand. The kid’s brain does the heavy lifting, and in the process, it learns.”
Can it really be that simple? Paint, cardboard, and sand? If so, why are we - as parents, as a society - plowing past early childhood guidelines in a race to be the first one to offer kindergarteners a keyboard? I asked psychiatrist, author, and screen-time expert Victoria Dunckley, M.D. to find out.
“There’s a persistent worry [I see] from parents: If I continue to restrict access to technology, will my child get left behind? But supporting brain integration by being as screen-free as possible means you’ll be optimizing your child’s learning ability,” Dr. Dunckley explains. “A child who has great computer skills but poor frontal lobe functioning will have trouble advancing in anything, since good frontal lobe function is needed to “get things done,” tolerate frustration, and develop a strong social network. The frontal lobe is where creativity, innovation, discipline, "big picture" thinking, and grit are born and bred.”
In fact, Dr. Dunckley is quick to point out the research proving computer skills are often overemphasized in schools, often to the detriment of other types of learning. “Rhesus monkeys can easily learn how to use a touchscreen or joystick to problem solve on a computer, and dolphins and apes have been taught to use iPads. It's just not that difficult.”
Even for older children preparing to enter the workforce, studies have yet to find any correlation between technology skills and better wages. So what gives? Overstimulation, dysregulation, disruption of the body clock, poor concentration, brain chemistry, blood flow, hormone balance, and chronic stress levels? Is it really all worth it? Dr. Dunckley isn’t convinced.
“Who will be left behind?” she quips. “The child who cannot concentrate.”